Mondo Knows Facts
Silkworms have been farmed for thousands of years
The moth no longer survives well in the wild and depends on people One cocoon yields a single continuous thread of up to a kilometre of silk fibre. Producers boil the cocoons to unwind them, killing the pupa inside. Selection over millennia produced moths that cannot fly. It sits in Mondo's animals collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: insects, silk, domestication
Silkworms have been farmed for thousands of years: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The moth no longer survives well in the wild and depends on people. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a animals fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Animals shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.